Primary Care Multidisciplinary Teams (MDTs) and the use of innovative data to inform Population Health in Northern Ireland

The Strategic Planning & Performance Group (SPPG) within the Department for Health are responsible for commissioning of the Primary Care Multi-disciplinary team (MDT) Programme in Northern Ireland. MDTs include the introduction of new physiotherapy, social work and mental health roles into general practice, to work alongside the existing practice team. The programme began in 2018 and at present circa 730,000 (36%) of our population have direct access to one or more core MDT services which includes a total 243 MDT Senior Practitioners across 114 GP Practices in 7 out of our 17 Federation areas. Each MDT practitioner uses specific templates within their GP clinical systems to record codified information on patient interactions including for example referral source, presenting symptoms, interventions and onward referrals, and these are extracted on a daily basis and merged onto the GPIP Platform. GPIP Data is then used to populate reports and dashboards for further analysis. Data quality and integrity is an essential aspect of the MDT programme and working in partnership with MDT leads and other clinical colleagues including GPs, significant work has been undertaken to ensure that the templates and codes meet the recording needs of service practitioners but also that they do not negatively impact on the needs of other clinicians when accessing patient records. Over the last 6-8 months, we have brought together key stakeholders to discuss challenges and agree a way forward as well as working the different clinical system providers to seek alternative solutions/ quality assure the data and roll out further staff training for all MDT practitioners. The data provided by the GPIP platform helps to evidence the impact of MDTs including patient treatment and pathways, for example we can monitor the prevalence of conditions by geographical areas or number of patients managed within primary care without the need for onward referral and we can analyse use of interventions by presenting condition. However, through innovative analysis including using PowerBi Dashboards to combine data sets, there are exciting opportunities to understand and plan services at a population health level across the region. For example, going forward we plan to integrate population demographic data with the MDT dataset in order to further understand the impact of socio-economic factors on population health at the primary care level.